Why MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 Chip Might Debut Without Any ‘Little’ Cores

MediaTek Dimensity 9300 — the purported next-generation flagship processor from the Taiwanese chipmaker — could debut without any “little” CPU cores. According to details shared by a tipster, MediaTek’s successor to the Dimensity 9200 SoC will not be equipped with Arm’s latest Cortex-A520 efficiency cores. Meanwhile, power consumption on the chipset is said to be down by 50 percent of the MediaTek Dimensity 9200 chipset. MediaTek has already confirmed some of the details surrounding the arrival of its next flagship grade chipset.

Tipster Digital Chat Station (translated from Chinese) recently claimed on Weibo that the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 will be equipped with four Cortex-X4 “super” cores and four Cortex-A720 “big” cores. This suggests that the next flagship chipset from MediaTek will bring a very notable change to smartphone chip design — almost all smartphone chips launched today are equipped with “performance” and “efficiency” cores.

On the other hand, MediaTek confirmed on Weibo that its next flagship chipset with “breakthrough architecture” — expected to debut as the Dimensity 9300 — would comprise the latest Arm Cortex-X4 and Cortex-A720 cores, paired with the Immortalis Mali-G720 GPU. The chipmaker’s post doesn’t mention the Cortex-A520 core, which appears to align with Digital Chat Station’s prediction that the chip won’t feature little cores.

The tipster claims that the upcoming chipset from MediaTek will offer up to 50 percent lower power consumption compared to the MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC that was launched last November. In a later post, they claim that the CPU sample scheduling is “still 1+3+4” which suggests that the company could treat three out of the four Cortex-X4 cores as medium-frequency cores and all four Cortex-A720 cores as low-frequency cores. 

The inclusion of multiple “super” cores is not common on Android smartphones, and only the Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 series of smartphones are equipped with two Cortex-X1 cores. However, the tipster claims that the Dimensity 9300 chip has a higher running score than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm’s rumoured flagship successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that powers most flagship smartphones released in 2023. The Gen 3 chip is tipped to feature an advanced Cortex-X4 prime core with a peak clock speed of 3.7GHz, along with five performance cores and two efficiency cores.